Typical toilet seats have plastic or metal hinges and fittings to attach to a conventional porcelain toilet bowl. Over time, use of the seat often causes the fittings securing the seat to the bowl to become loose, allowing the seat to wobble under the weight of a person using the toilet. Not only is a wobbling toilet seat irritating to users, but it can also pose a safety issue. When faced with a wobbling seat, very young children, elderly, and others with stability challenges may fall or lose their balance, possibly resulting in serious injury.
Since the fittings are usually plastic, sufficiently tightening an unstable seat to remove the wobble may not be possible. Threads may be stripped or other damage may occur. Once loose or damaged, the fittings are difficult to tighten and often come loose repeatedly over time.
Additionally, tightening the seat fittings may be difficult or potentially distasteful. On a typical toilet, the component of the fittings that has to be accessed in order to tighten the seat is often located on the underside of the rim of the bowl. In many circumstances, it is difficult to position oneself in such a way as to have the mechanical advantages necessary to quickly complete the task. Given the potentially unsanitary condition of the area under the rim of the toilet bowl, a quick and easy means for installing a toilet seat and keeping it tightly fastened to the bowl is highly desirable.
Many have sought solutions to this problem. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,212,840 describes latches that may be attached to the underside of a toilet seat and that clamp the seat to the inside edge of a toilet bowl when the seat is in the lowered position. Installation of rubber locknuts in place of standard metal or plastic locknuts may also be used to fix a wobbling seat. However, such fixes are, at best, short term and, at worst, insufficient to actually resolve the problem.